Experiment of One: A Gastric-Bypass Runner Chases Her Marathon Dream

We on the Runner’s World staff have a pet peeve often observed among our readers. We’ll meet them at a running event like a Race Expo, and they’ll immediately say something like: “I’m not a real runner like the people I read about in the magazine.” We immediately reply: “Not true. We’re all much more alike than different.”The other morning I had a long phone conversation with a runner named PK. She said, “I’m not a real runner. I’m too short, wide, and slow.”Not a real runner? You decide, based on the following information PK gave me:* Most of her best friends are runners.* She loves the process of planning her workouts, i.e., the mix of hill drills, and long runs, and tempo runs.* She enjoys running local 5-Ks with her 11-year old daughter, side by side, at her daughter’s pace.* When she signs up for yoga or swimming or strength-training classes, she immediately asks the instructor: “How is this class going to make me a better runner?”* To celebrate her 40th birthday a couple of years ago, she trained for and completed the Marine Corps Marathon.Know anyone like this? Me too. And they are all most assuredly “real runners.”I’ll have to admit, though, that PK is different from most runners I know in one astonishing way: Four years ago, she weighed 335 pounds.This week, PK weighs 132. “I knew you’d ask me, so I got on the scale this morning,” she reported. She achieved this miraculous weight-loss after having gastric-bypass surgery a little more than four years ago. She had tried everything before that--the usual diets, plus nutritional and mental-health counseling. At first, she herself was strongly opposed to bypass surgery. Eventually she realized it was the best way to “get my body size to match up with the person inside me.”Even before the surgery, while weighing more than 300 pounds, PK entered short road races and sprint triathlons. “I love running,” she says, “and I happen to be one of those people who likes putting themselves in uncomfortable situations, like traveling alone to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language.”PK chooses not to uncover her privacy cloak for professional/career reasons. She’s a 42-year-old mother-of-two who works as a high-pressure, frequent-traveling strategic planner for an international company in the technology field. I first learned of her in a recent article in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition, “Case Study: Nutrition Challenges of a Marathon Runner With a Gastric Bypass,” where she is also identified as PK. The article was written by veteran marathon nutritionist Nancy Clark.After surgery, PK had a stomach the size of an egg--that is, about 95 percent smaller than the rest of us. As you can imagine, this wreaks havoc with a distance runner’s attempts to hydrate and consume carbs. The stomach just doesn’t have room for everything. Worse, it often reacts by producing sudden, savage diarrhea. PK experienced this six months post-surgery, when she began building her mileage and thinking about a marathon. “I’d have these wicked attacks that hurt a lot, and made me sweat heavily, and exhausted me,” she reports.There is essentially no history or science of gastric bypass endurance athletes. You need to drink up and fuel up for your training/racing, yet your stomach doesn’t let you. Marathoners need carbs, but bypass people are told to consume mainly protein. “Four years later, I’m still trying to figure it out,” PK told me. “I’ve gotten better at it, but it’s still really tough.”She persisted with her marathon goal, a true “experiment of one,” and completed the 2009 Marine Corps Marathon in 6:34. It wasn’t a record, unless you’re counting records for gastric-bypass marathoners, in which case it might be one, not that anyone keeps track of these things. PK has yet to meet or hear about another bypass marathoner, though she has met a half-marathoner. At any rate, to PK, Marine Corps “was the best experience. Incredible. I’m always surprised by how much I feel like crying with joy when I reach a finish line.”An easy, fast, and somewhat salty talker, PK sprinkles the conversation with plenty of humor. She has other Marine Corps memories too. “For the first 20 miles, the Marines were all calling out, ‘Thanks for running our race,’ “ she remembers. “The last six, it turned to: ‘Could you hurry up and finish?’ "Two years later, her weight still stable, PK is thinking more about fun, fitness, and her 11-year-old daughter-runner (and taking care of balky knees) than she is about other marathons. She’ll do those 5-Ks with her daughter this year. Some short triathlons. More bicycling than in past years, perhaps. Mostly, she’ll continue celebrating the unity of her body's size and runner’s spirit. “It was such an amazing gift I gave myself four years ago,” she says. “I don’t have to carry around the burden of that weight any longer. I can just focus on my training.”Clark ended her journal article with the following observation about PK. “Counseling clients such as PK leaves me in awe of their mental strengths, determination, and willpower. PK worked extraordinarily hard to reach her goals. She endured physical and lifestyle challenges to fulfill a dream.”I agree totally. In fact, I have never talked to a more-real runner than PK.

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